Sunday, April 13, 2008

Scrim against Northeastern

It was a pretty fun game. Our goal was to come out strong and play hard and get our heads in the game from the get-go. I personally felt guilty for showing up late because I was coming from church... I told the team to be cleated by 11:30 to for warm-up, but I came at 11:50 and felt like a hypocrite. :( I'm sorry guys.

sMITe came out strong in man defense and nice flow on offense. We had 9 players so everyone had plenty of playing time. Natasha was making some nice cuts, getting wiiiide open on her girl, which was really awesome to see. I thought my dump cuts were a lot better this game; I made it a point to drive really hard in one direction and then cut for the disc. There were some nice dump-swing action going on.

Northeastern also put on a strange zone defense where they had a mark and three defenders in a vertical wall so they forced a sideline and as the disc was swung back and forth the force changed. (Like 1-3-3 but the middle three were vertical), or maybe it was just a really non-curved cup... anyway, it doesn't matter because our zone O looked really good; Catherine and Erika were crashing well and kept the disc moving. There were a few misthrown hammers early on in the game, but in general, we were able to work the disc up the field easily, going around and through the cup. Also, it started to rain which made some of our throws a little off, but overall it didn't affect our game too much.

Northeastern liked to dump it and give-and-go. We had some trouble with our dump defense, especially with getting beat up the line or just not getting our mark on. It got better throughout the game though but it's something that we should work on during practice. Personally I need to work on getting my mark on faster and close my shoulders to cut off the swing.

There were some deep throws that were hard to read because the wind was bouncing the disc up and down but everyone was pretty heads up. There was one huck that was supposed to go to Meri but she and her two defenders missed the disc and Stephanie ended up catching it for the score.

I think I learned how to play wing (D) during a few key points this game. They had three handlers back so it was basically man downfield but Darlene told me to take away the biggest threat, either the wing or the third handler. I don't know, but something seemed to make sense about that comment this time and I ended up getting three Ds, one of them *almost* a callahan... should've laid out for it better =P

There was this one long point where I had hucked it to Smeri and we were about 20 yards from our endzone. She dumped it back to me and I called a timeout. We called a standard endzone play - open side cut (Steph), dump (Catherine), swing (Erika), but after we set up our offense, they set a zone on us. So the off-point guarded Catherine, leaving Erika wide open so I threw through the cup to Erika and she made an easy pass to someone cutting breakside (probably Smeri) Yay. :)

Final score 15-5.

The men's team also won their scrim against BU 15-8.

sMITe in the Tech for Yale Cup on Friday: http://www-tech.mit.edu/V128/N18/smite.html

I can't believe sectionals is in 5 days... eeek